She’s [bleeping] Matt Damon … and his revenge
This is hi-larious … Jimmy Kimmel has been making Matt Damon jokes for years, not just on his current talk show, where there’s a running gag of Damon always being bumped for time, but also on THE MAN SHOW. Now, with help from Sarah Silverman (Jimmy’s post-wife-and-children Hollywood paramour … boooo), Matt gets his own back.
WARNING: Extremely comic-raunchy, but any cleaner and it wouldn’t work — the contrast between the raunch of the lyrics and the mostly chipper delivery and happy-clappy music is side-splitting. Though paradoxically (and this is someone who loved THE ARISTOCRATS talking), I think ABC’s constant bleeping over the f-word actually makes the song funnier by making the word more of a pure abstraction than something with a real referent.
The second part of the Silverman interview is here and some of the background can be gleaned here with Guillermo and here when Damon finally appears on the Kimmel show.
I think Kimmel and Silverman would make a great comedy team, like a postmodern Burns and Allen (the analogy is fairly precise — dry straight man and unwittingly brilliant ditz) if the right format for them could be found.
UPDATE: Jimmy responds and one-ups Sarah brilliantly (thanks Steve in the combox¹, and Mark before him). He’s [bleeping] Ben Affleck:
As Steve points out, it’s even funnier than Sarah’s video, in part (I say, at least) because it mocks the most fatuous exercise in pop-music history — well, the most fatuous one of 1985 anyway² — the “We Are the World” video. As Jimmy pointed out to the New York Times deadpan: “Every once in a while Hollywood rallies itself for a worthy cause. We saw that with the ‘We Are the World’ video, with ‘USA for Africa’ and after 9/11. This is just the next natural step in that progression.”
Indeed … that 1985 exercise in posturing feelgoodism couldn’t survive my first contact with PJ O’Rourke. Here is just a sample of the demolition job he does on it in “Give War a Chance,” proving that the song literally contains neither rhyme nor reason. Some of the detail in the mockery is Proustian in its memory for detail, e.g., having Huey Lewis “duet” with a long-haired blonde. And in an interview, Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz hinted that “We Are the World” hatred runs deep in his blood too: “egos all checked at the door for the most part,” something that could not be less true of WAtW, though stated like an ad slogan, if it came from Baghdad Bob himself. To ape that video in service of essentially nothing — a comic lie in response to another comic lie in support of a made-up comic “feud” between two rich celebrities — demonstrates the purity of emptiness in the original.
————————————————
¹ BTW … if you think my #3 in this combox was serious … you don’t deserve to have your delusions shattered. So, to those deluded ones who think those words were seriously meant, I tell you in absolute sincerity that they were. I stand by every last one of them. And I confess to you, the deluded, that “Victor Morton” is simply a character that I created to cover up my real identity: Fred Phelps.
² Actually … wasn’t that the year of Live-Aid? OK … second most-fatuous exercise of 1985, at least.